The prisoners dilemma

The debate over voting rights for prisoners poses considerable peril for David
Cameron.

For the past six months, the UK has chaired the Council of Europe, the body that oversees the human rights court at Strasbourg. David Cameron had hoped to use this period to reform the court to prevent its unwarranted interference in matters of national sovereignty. Yet the Government ends its tenure locked in the biggest fight yet with the Strasbourg court, after it ruled yesterday that Britain’s blanket ban on prisoner voting must be lifted. Ministers maintain that they are obliged to implement the court’s judgments, even if they object to them. Otherwise, they say, prisoners will be able to sue for compensation in British courts. Moreover, the Government has discretion over how to implement the ban: it could, for instance, limit the right to vote to prisoners jailed for less than two years.

But that misses the point. This is no longer about prisoner votes but national sovereignty. In a debate last year, MPs overwhelmingly took the view that this matter should be decided by the nation’s own democratically elected Parliament and not by an extra-territorial and unaccountable judicial body. Parliament wants to keep the law as it stands; so unless the Government wants to whip its own MPs – and rely on opposition parties for support, which is not guaranteed – it would almost certainly be defeated.

This is a moment of considerable peril for Mr Cameron, who once said that the thought of giving prisoners the vote made him sick; but it is also an opportunity. He can either pick a fight with his own party and try to ram through a Bill that will implement the Strasbourg ruling, a position that will not be understood in the country at large. Or he can tell the court that the UK Government is not prepared to accept this perverse ruling, and thereby reassert the rights of our own Parliament to make its own laws.